Movie review: 'Isle of Dogs' chases its tail

Thursday

If you’re expecting Wes Anderson’s “Isle of Dogs” to be the cat’s pajamas, you’re in for a rude awakening. True to its title, it’s largely a dog, lacking bite as it barks up too many wrong trees.

Visually, Anderson’s second foray into stop-motion animation, after “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” is a mind-blowing marvel of wondrous imagination and ingenuity. But the story, best described as a hallucinatory version of “Lassie Come Home” in reverse, is deep in dog poo. There’s no central context, just a rambling exercise in making it up as he goes along. It’s also an irresponsible appropriation of Japanese culture by a white Anglo fanboy.

Instead of homage, it’s more a laundry list of things he thinks are cool about the far-out Far East: sumo wrestlers, geisha girls, sushi and kabuki, just to name a few. It’s also a hollow, utterly transparent allegory for Trump’s treatment of “the other,” namely the undocumented Mexicans he and his supporters want evicted. This is something obviously dear to the native Texan; almost as dear as his love of pets born of the canine persuasion. They are his anthropomorphic best friends in his long-winded tale of a futuristic Japanese dynasty in which cats are favored by the despotic rulers.

That’s bad news for all the Fidos of Japan. Using “snout fever” as an excuse, the very large, very mean Emperor Kobayashi - he, a fan of the executive order, like someone else we know - has deemed all dogs, including the loyal companion of his adopted 12-year-old nephew, Atari, to be exiled to the apocalyptic Trash Island. If this land of rotting garbage reminds you of “WALL-E,” it’s purely intentional. In fact, the entire movie feels like bits borrowed from other, better movies from “Citizen Kane” to “Prince and the Pauper.”

But it’s the aforementioned “Lassie” from which Anderson does most of his pilfering, sending young Atari to Trash Island on a mission to reunite with his beloved security mutt, Spots. Assisting him are five self-anointed alpha dogs possessing the industriousness of Macgyver. They all speak English, of course. What else would you expect from Japanese Akitas? This is Wes Anderson, people! And just to flip a middle finger to consistency, Anderson has Atari and all the other humans speak in Japanese - without subtitles. OK, some of it is kindly translated by Frances McDormand, but most of it is left purposely cryptic for those of us who don’t speak Japanese.

From Atari, we get zero English, providing no clue to what he’s saying or thinking, which is highly limiting in character development. So, we feel nothing for him. But we also feel little for the dogs and their plight, stuck on a desolate island with little water and even less food beyond the maggot-filled scraps buried in the trash. Of the five alpha dogs, Rex (Edward Norton), King (Bob Balaban), Boss (Bill Murray) and Duke (Jeff Goldblum), it’s Bryan Cranston’s Chief tossed the biggest bones. He’s also the only “stray” among the bunch, which is Anderson’s signal for us to feel sorry for him. He also stands to get the girl, aka the gorgeous former dog show queen, Nutmeg (voiced by the unforgivably wasted Scarlett Johansson). Also keep an ear out for Greta Gerwig as a student with a plan to save the dying dogs, and Yoko Ono as a scientist named - wait for it - Yoko Ono.

The latter two play central roles in the busy, convoluted finale, which is so poorly executed it makes you forget how well Anderson started out in the opening 40 minutes by creating an intriguing sense of place, vibrant characters and an excellent parable about our modern times. Then, he and his three co-writers -- Jason Schwartzman, Roman Coppola and Kunichi Nomura -- throw it all away with a tidal wave of tweeness and mindless action. By the end, your head is swimming. Worse, you feel nothing for anyone, human or canine.

That’s a huge set backwards from his emotion-filled “Moonrise Kingdom,” and an even bigger one from his wonderfully madcap “The Grand Budapest Hotel.” Where those movies made you feel vigorously alive, “Isle of Dogs” leaves you stranded in a sea of nothing. Yet, even though it’s a failure by Wes Anderson standards, I still must recommend it simply for the outstanding animation. What Anderson and his team do in making the pooches look realistic, from their expressive eyes to their life-like fur, is astonishing. And it’s just solid enough to make you forget just how mangy this mutt becomes when Anderson is carelessly left off his leash.